Currently equivocal findings on personality similarity and attraction can be clarified if 'personality ' and 'acquaintance' are recognized as essentially generic concepts rather than single entities. A 'filtering ' process is proposed to account for longitudinal acquaintance development where 'personality ' has several different and successive places and where different measures of personality are sequentially appropriate tests of the personality-friendship relationship. A study is reported where 40 previously unacquainted subjects completed three different personality tests and then reported sociometric choices at different points of developing acquaintance ( I month; 3 months; 8 months). Whilst similarity on the CPI mediated sociometric choices at none of these points, similarity on Allport-Vernon Study of Values predicted choices only at Time 2 (P< 0.01), and the Reptest only at Time 3 ( P < 0.01). Results are discussed in terms of systematic test of models of partner's personality in acquaintance and it is suggested that a search not for the correct measure of personality but for the relative place of each measure in developing acquaintance will lead towards the resolution of several existing ambiguities in the attraction literature.

UK professionals use a range of intervention approaches to promote communication development in pre-school deaf children by influencing the family's' interaction style. This investigation surveyed the approaches used and explored how these translated into specific practices.An online questionnaire was developed and reviewed by a panel of experts. Part 1 explored professional background and approaches used. Findings showed that the main approaches were: Auditory Verbal Therapy, Hanen, "Parent-Child Interaction Therapy" (PCIT) and guidance from the Monitoring Protocol for deaf babies and children (GMP). Of the 158 professionals who completed Part 1, 142 used a combination of these approaches, with each approach selected at least 93 times. When participants were asked which approach or combination of approaches influenced their practice most strongly, over 25% chose GMP (mainly teachers of the deaf) and over 25% chose Hanen and/or PCIT (mainly speech and language therapists). Part 2, completed by 117 professionals, required participants to rate how frequently they suggested particular strategies to parents and how frequently they used particular methods to encourage parents to adopt those strategies. There was no evidence of an association between the approaches selected and methods used and very little evidence of an association between the approaches and strategies selected. Many professionals were recommending similar strategies and using similar methods but there was also some variation in practice.The overall findings suggest that future research comparing named approaches may be of less value than studies that seek to explore the potential effectiveness of particular strategies and methods.3

Evaluation of strangers can be based on assessments of either available cues or inferred characteristics. Many studies of interpersonal attraction present subjects with information on Others' psychological characteristics (personality, traits, attitudes), but it is argued that additional, “external” information about Others is normally available to interacting individuals and provides a basis for evaluative inferences while constituting a context in which the impact of any available psychological information would be assessed. Two experiments are reported: one in which presentation of external information about a stranger evoked significantly (p < 0.025) higher attraction ratings than available psychological information; and a second where similarity of Subject and Other on external characteristics had greater effects upon attraction scores than did similarity of psychological characteristics. Results are consistent with the view that external information provides a modifying context in which the attractiveness of psychological information is assessed and suggest two distinct stages in attraction responses.

Forty subjects chose trait words to describe six public figures and then received information regarding several strangers' judgements of the same public figures. The strangers' judgements had been ‘rigged’ to be similar or dissimilar in terms of the evaluative and descriptive aspects of the subjects' original judgements. Two hypotheses were tested: (a) that a subject's rating of the attractiveness of a stranger would be differentially influenced by the extent of similarity to his own judgement in both the evaluative and descriptive components of that judgement, and (b) that cognitively complex subjects would be less likely than cognitively simple subjects to rate strangers as unattractive when they manifest descriptive dissimilarity. Significant main effects were found for both evaluative similarity (P < 0·001) and descriptive similarity (P < 0·01), evaluative similarity having greater influence on attraction than descriptive similarity. Cognitive complexity interacted with descriptive similarity (P < 0·05) to the extent that complex subjects were more accepting of strangers who used different trait dimensions. The results are discussed in relation to consensual validation and the suggestion that validation of judgement about others' personality has a salient place in attraction.

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